Gaming - Page 45

Two indie games have recently cancelled their Xbox versions, and while this is undoubtedly the result of the tough realities of games development, it could also show that game developers are putting more priority on PlayStation 5 and PC platforms than they are for Xbox.

Over the past few days, I noticed an interesting development: Indie game devs are starting to cancel the Xbox versions of their games. Recently, I've seen two games do this: 1348 Ex Voto, an extremely stylish medieval sword fighting game, and the other is a game set in a more recognizable and higher-profile brand, with Nickelodeon's Splat Pack, a combination of old retro games put in a single package.

Each group has its own individual reasons on why the Xbox versions are cancelled, and while there's no comments from Limited Run Games on the Nickelodeon Splat Pack other than a confirmation of the Xbox SKU cancellation, the team behind 1348 Ex Voto explained their situation.

Highguard is a free-to-play 'PVP raid shooter' which was showcased at the end of The Game Awards, and it emerged yesterday - to a very mixed response.

On the one hand, the game from Wildlight Studios - which has a number of former Respawn staff on board (of Apex Legends fame) - received a battering (mostly) with the reviews on its Steam page. But on the other hand, some gamers are enjoying it, and feel that Highguard is being unfairly treated by its detractors.

Whatever you think of the game - if you've tried it, or just watched some gameplay footage (and I fall into the latter camp) - there's one thing that's clear: it's highly polarizing.

Banjo: Recompiled for PC is a native port of Banjo-Kazooie, the classic 3D platformer from the Nintendo 64. From developer Rare, it's a game widely considered to be on par with Nintendo's Super Mario 64, and its native PC port supports widescreen and ultrawide resolutions, unlocked frame rates, and mod support.

This is all possible due to the N64: Recompiled project that allows modders to effectively reverse engineer Nintendo 64 games to get them running natively on modern PC hardware - with support for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Yes, this means this port is playable on the Steam Deck, with modder Wiseguy adding quality-of-life features like analog camera controls, improved input latency, and the ability to keep your collect-a-thon progress when exiting a level or running out of health. The port also includes three one-click mods for players to install, including a high-resolution texture pack and popular "ROM hacks" Nostalgia 64 and Jiggies of Time.

The real-life Master Chief isn't too keen about AI taking his job and reproducing his voice, and while Xbox has no plans to replace him, that isn't the case everywhere.

AI is everywhere, and practically every company is trying to use it to save money. Sometimes this means laying off thousands of workers, replacing them with automated systems in an attempt to simultaneously save money and boost productivity. In the entertainment industry, AI hasn't taken over just yet, but some (like James Earl Jones, for example) have sold their likeness to be reproduced by AI.

Microsoft is one such company that has invested heavily into AI, dumping billions into the tech, leading to company-wide adoption. Xbox has utilized AI in unique ways, creating a generative AI simulator that can render games without any coding from a game developer. Xbox has also made deals with AI companies like inWorld to make AI-generated stories, quests, and dialogue.

Following rounds of heavy layoffs, Microsoft may be more careful and selective in which games actually get greenlit at Xbox.

It sounds like Xbox's management may now be more deliberate and methodical with its first-party game approvals. A bit ago, Microsoft conducted hefty layoffs across its entire company, with the Xbox segment laying off hundreds of workers across Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax, and Activision. Microsoft also shut down The Initiative, a studio that had been working on a costly Perfect Dark project since 2018--that game was also cancelled. The layoffs have significantly harmed Xbox's reputation at a time when the public sentiment around the group is already at an all-time low.

Microsoft doesn't want this to happen again--this process has been grueling, costly, and ultimately has led to a lot of wastage--wasted spending on creating a product that will never actually release--in the entertainment division. According to Craig Duncan, who now leads Xbox Game Studios, the ultimate goal is to ensure Microsoft can avoid "having to" cancel projects, lay off hundreds of workers, and shut down entire content studios.

Remedy steps in to clarify that they have not revealed a release window for Control Resonant, helping clear up erroneous reports.

Days ago, news began circulating that Control Resonant was set for a Q2 2026 release (around June), with Remedy themselves reportedly saying this. Taking a closer look at the report, it was obvious from the get-go it wasn't from Remedy. For one, the share rating was a dead giveaway that this was from an analyst firm, and not from Remedy--the firm Inderes, to be exact.

Indeed that's the case, and Remedy's communication director Thomas Puha has stepped in to squash the rumors: "Since some news [sites] are crediting us saying something that we haven't: Remedy has only ever communicated that the release window of CONTROL Resonant is 2026. Anything else is speculation," Puha said on Twitter.

GTA 6 will be a digital-only game at launch, says reputable leaker Graczdari.

New reports indicate that GTA 6 will be a digital product at launch, with physical disc copies withheld until an undetermined period after release. A purported source close to European game retail chains has told website PPE.pl that Take-Two Interactive has no plans to launch a disc version of GTA 6 when the game is expected to launch on November 19, 2026.

Instead, GTA 6 is expected to be a digital game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, apparently as a means to avoid spoilers. The move could also be predicated on maximizing profits, as producing and shipping millions of discs can be costly, but is usually seen as a worth-it proposal; all of Take-Two's biggest games are on discs.

The Blizzard Showcase goes live on January 29, starting with World of Warcraft and ending with Diablo in February.

Today, Blizzard revealed specifics around its big celebration plans. The publisher will celebrate its 35th anniversary with two big events: the Blizzard Showcase that kicks off in a few days, and Blizzcon 2026 in September. The showcase will focus on four main franchises, delivering updates for each: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and Hearthstone.

"We're kicking off 2026 with the Blizzard Showcase, a series of developer-led spotlights featuring big announcements, sneak peeks, and teases across our universes. As we look toward the future, this event celebrates the artists, makers, and visionaries behind our games, and our players who bring them to life, as we celebrate 35 years of community and craft," Blizzard writes.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan gave many details about Playground Games' upcoming reboot of the classic Xbox title, Fable.

During the interview Duncan said that he hasn't played much of the game, but he has experienced has been "mindblowing," specifically with the combat and Living Population. For those who don't know, the Living Population is what Playground Games refers to as the more than 1,000 unique non-player characters (NPCs) that populate Fable's world, called Albion.

Each of these NPCs is handcrafted with a unique name, appearance, personality, worldviews, hobbies, and daily life routines, which involve work and play. Additionally, each of these NPCs is fully voice-acted. Duncan went on to recognize the "special ideas" in the original Fable trilogy, and said that Playground Games has taken those ideas and modernized them, with the executive once again pointing out the Living Population feature.

A YouTuber and hardware engineer, MrYeester, recently posted a video on the "mryeester" YouTube channel that showcases how you too can turn your PC into a coin-activated gaming rig.

The creator of the coin-activated gaming PC explained in the above video that he is treating the PC as if it were an old arcade gaming machine, and to get a PC to work as an arcade machine, some customization needs to take place, specifically with the front-panel on/off button being replaced by an authentic coin acceptor. This device measures the properties of the coins inserted into it and can differentiate between them by identifying their magnetism, weight, and size.

The idea is that once the coin acceptor detects the correct coin, it will trigger the "on button press" signal, which is sent to the motherboard's Power SW header. The coin acceptor can be set to accept only one type of coin, and to get it set up, the modder uses a PSU breakout or adapter to provide 12V to the coin acceptor and relay. The modder then routes the relay output to the motherboard's front-panel header.

The Old School RuneScape team has unveiled the fourth raid to come to the ancient MMO that is teeming with players, and according to the developers, this raid will be the toughest one it has ever released.

Jagex has explained in a recent blog post that The Fractured Archives are located deep beneath Gielinor within an ancient cave used by the god Guthix to store his most treasured items. Players will be traveling to the Fractured Archive for the raid, where they will encounter "agents of other gods, curious creatures, Guthixian guardians, and more". Players will be tasked with stopping the contents of the archive from falling into the wrong hands.

Jagex wrote in the post that they are taking a Theatre of Blood-styled approach to the Fractured Archive raid, which means players will face off against a selection of demibosses, won't encounter any puzzle rooms, and then engage in a final epic boss battle in the final phase of the raid. Notably, players will also be able to solo the Fractured Archive raid, but Jagex is first focusing on making the raid optimized for 2-8 players. Moreover, the developer warns that soloing the Fractured Archive will be "difficult."

Developers have been on a quest for quite some time to get the first DOOM game to run on as many different types of electronics as possible, and now the grandfather of first-person-shooter games has made its way over to earbuds. Yes, the same earbuds you can use to listen to music. DOOM can now be played with them.

Have you ever wondered if earbuds can run the 1993 classic first-person shooter title DOOM? Yeah, neither have I, but nevertheless, I was impressed when I discovered it is not only possible, but is currently happening. This quirky tech project takes advantage of the PineBuds Pro's open-source software to access its tiny processor, which then executes the DOOM code.

Since earbuds don't have a display, the DOOMBuds streams the game's output over the internet to a web browser where the user can watch and play the game remotely. This essentially means the earbuds have been converted into the PC running DOOM, and the browser has become the display and controller. Since the earbuds have very limited performance headroom in terms of horsepower, the developer had to make some concessions to get DOOM to be able to work.

Ubisoft recently announced the third and final restructuring of its company, and it involved closing several studios, cancelling many of its titles, and laying off what is expected to be at least hundreds of people. However, one more franchise could be added to the list of now-dead Ubisoft IPs.

In a recent episode of the Insider Gaming podcast, Insider Gaming founder and editor Tom Henderson said that Ubisoft has quietly killed off the Watch Dogs franchise, which comes on the heels of the editor saying that he has seen internal chat messages between Ubisoft employees who are slagging off the publisher's owners, the Guillemot brothers.

During the podcast, Henderson said that he has heard the Watch Dogs franchise is "completely dead", and that the performance of Watch Dogs: Legion is the reason behind Ubisoft's decision to shelve the IP.

Rockstar announced the next-gen update for the first Red Dead Redemption game in November 2025, sparking the conversation as to where the next-gen update is for Red Dead Redemption 2.

For those who don't know, Red Dead Redemption 2 still hasn't received a current-gen console update; the versions of the game running on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles are the versions that were released on the PS4-era of consoles, just made compatible with current-gen hardware. With those versions of RDR2 being brought over and Rockstar now doing an official remaster of the first game for current-gen consoles, fans want to know when the same treatment will be applied to RDR2.

Rumors of the next-gen update, which would introduce a 60FPS mode, and likely improved visual fidelity in the form of additional graphical technologies, have been circulating for quite some time, and now Reece "Kiwi Talkz" Reilly has responded to an X post where a fan of the Red Dead franchise said he was "losing faith" in Rockstar releasing an enhanced edition for RDR2, as he believes that sources cited by leakers about an RDR2 enhanced edition mistakenly got the RDR2 and Red Dead Redemption mixed up.

Master Chief's voice actor shares a rare behind-the-scenes story about Halo 5, acknowledging the controversy around the game's bait-and-switch advertising while saying he actually pushed back against some of the decisions that were made.

Halo 5 has gone down in history as having one of the most misleading advertisement campaigns of all time, but things might have been even more confusing if Master Chief actor Steve Downes hadn't expressed his thoughts while recording.

In a new video celebrating 25 years of the Halo franchise, Downes answers fan questions for a good 38 minutes, and one of them was about the different promos like the misleading Hunt the Truth campaign that were used to advertise the game in the Xbox One's earlier days.

Ubisoft recently announced a third round of cost-cutting measures that included the closure of several studios and the cancellation of titles, including the highly anticipated reboot of the original Prince of Persia game. To go along with the studio closures and development cancellations, thousands of employees are likely to be jobless, and we are now hearing that they are making their feelings known in internal chat rooms/threads that are equivalent to Slack messages.

In a recent episode of the Insider Gaming podcast, Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, a well-known Ubisoft insider, explained that the publisher is really not in a good position at the moment and that upper management has positioned itself in such a way that they will always have control of the company, regardless of whether current performance metrics call for a leadership change. Henderson pointed to Ubisoft's stock price being incredibly low and its valuation being under $1 billion, even though it was nearing $10 billion.

Notably, many of the employees at the publisher's studios were made aware of the third round of cost-cutting measures through Ubisoft's public announcement, and given the headcount reduction of 3,633 people from 20,729 in 2022 to what is now 17,097 as of September 2025, they are understandably annoyed with upper management. Henderson said that it is "fascinating" seeing employee messages from Ubisoft's internal communications systems "slagging off the Guillemot brothers. It's actually insane. It's not nice stuff as well, alright, it's really hard stuff."

Microsoft just wrapped up an Xbox Developer Direct where several upcoming titles were showcased, including the highly anticipated Fable from Playground Games and Forza Horizon 6.

The Xbox Developer Direct was an overall success, with the YouTube video posted to the official Xbox channel raking in more than 1 million views, and many positive comments about the contents of the showcase. The highlights were Playground Games' Fable reboot and Forza Horizon 6, with Fable really taking the spotlight following the unveiling of the new morality system, living population, and image fidelity.

The success of the Xbox Developer Direct has now spawned rumors, as Windows Central editor and well-known Microsoft insider Jez Corden said during a recent episode of The XB2 podcast, "I have heard that they are exploring doing another one this year. So like don't be surprised if we do get another dev directly share at some point." Corden went on to mention that Xbox has quite a lot to show off this year, and said he has heard Xbox specifically is discussing a second Developer Direct, and not a "Partner Preview".

Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 won't be out for a while--longer than gamers are expecting, one analyst predicts.

Right now isn't a great time to produce a major video games console. Hungry AI datacenters are eating up the critical memory and storage chips needed to make PlayStation consoles, and while Sony says it has procured short-term supply, what does the future look like? Will these shortages impact PlayStation 6 production?

Mindful of these disruptions, analysts predict that Sony could delay the PS6 console and elongate the current PS5 lifecycle. Indeed, that does seem to be what Sony is doing; company CFO Lin Tao says that the PS5 is currently in "the middle of its journey," indicating the PS5 could be supported until 2030. Does that mean gamers will have to wait until 2030 for the PS6, though?

Xbox exclusivity is dead as Microsoft seeks greater profits through expanded sales, but there's a better, more PR-friendly way to say that.

Microsoft telegraphs that it will keep releasing all of its future Xbox games on PlayStation, further burying the idea of first-party Xbox game exclusives. In a recent interview with Games Radar, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan echoes a sentiment that we've heard everyone at Xbox say: Developers want as many people playing their games as possible. That means releasing on more platforms.

For Microsoft, it's all about growth through sales and players; Xbox products can often be infused with online elements and microtransaction hooks to ensure the spending can continue long after the game is purchased. Microsoft is reportedly stressing the Xbox games unit to deliver more profit, leading to the games division to make radical changes like breaking exclusivity in the hopes of selling more games--and generating more profit by virtue of boosted revenue.

Developer Undead Labs and Xbox haven't given an update on State of Decay 3 since a short trailer was released at 2024's Xbox Games Showcase. Now that Xbox has wrapped up its 2025 showcase without providing an update on the title, many fans are wondering about its current status.

However, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan recently commented on State of Decay 3 during an interview with GamesRadar, confirming that the title, which has been in development for six years now, is still undergoing development and that what he has seen of it makes him quite excited. Duncan was asked whether fans would see more of State of Decay 3 sometime in 2026.